


Never Better

by orphan_account



Category: Sleepy Hollow
Genre: A heathy and supportive Orion/Abbie/Pandora threesome in the afterlife, Abbie and Ichabod clones doing the do in the next room while original Ichy cried real tears, Disfigurement, Grief/Mourning, Ichabod grows a conscience, If I continued this it would have included:, Troll fic treated a bit too seriously, non-consensual medication, posting this because I mentioned it while drunk on twitter, s4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 07:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9311306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ichabod mourns Abbie, cries a lot, and won't die. And he kinda blindly trusts people that have basically imprisoned him but he is too dumb to see it. Diane takes Molly and peaces out because that is literally the only sane reaction. Season 4 oneshot in which I completely ignore cannon cause well for one I didn't watch it and two because its garbage anyways.





	

A year after her death, in a fit of carelessness, Ichabod slips up. Perhaps it was because he’s still unused to hunting without a partner - Abbie not there to pick up his slack - or maybe its the anger that flares brighter and wilder now that she isn’t there to hold him in check. Her very absence spurring him ever closer to brink.

In a blind fury he misjudges the trajectory of a talon and he is suddenly pinned to the ground with the demon’s roaring maw above him dripping obscenely and mere centimeters away from ripping off his face. 

Without backup and little other recourse, Ichabod drives a dagger into the beast, Abbie and their last moments together dancing behind his eyes. The light in her eyes as she told him to keep kicking demon ass.

‘Live Ichabod, you great fool, live and suffer as you deserve.’ he thinks, as he rips into the demon again and again. Whatever her intentions had been, whatever affection she had conveyed in their parting - all of it was short lived in the endless march of a life without her. Despite it all, this was what she had condemned him to. Fury and fear and loneliness.

The wretched thing above him screams in pain and then finally releases him. Its wounds dousing Ichabod in blood as it rolls away and collapses beside him. And for a moment Ichabod breathes, thinking it over. He had thought he had researched the creature thoroughly. He had found the scrolls and translated the texts. He knew that the demon’s bites were poisonous but he must have missed something, some small detail because he is surprised when he sees the demon’s blood eat into the sleeve of his coat. Then the pain hits, agonizing burning pain. He is screaming and ripping at his clothes when he sees with startling clarity the very moment the light blinks out in his left eye and then he’s falling to the forest floor.

He has failed her yet again.

It’s not at all like his first death. A numb floating affair that had been. No, this is a burning hateful lonely death - a fitting bookend to a life of arrogance and cowardice. His skin and sight burned away to sit like a fine ash on his stilted coward’s tongue. But what does it matter now that it is done. Ichabod welcomes the release.

But of course he doesn’t die. Abbie had always been the wiser of the two. She was always proven right in the end.

—————

He wakes up in a compound somewhere outside of DC, hooked up to an unnerving amount of machines, his throat aching with thirst and completely incapable of understanding how he had cheated death once again, much less how anyone could have known to rescue him.

“Tracking device”, a guard supplies as he gestures to a nurse to bring Ichabod water.

Walters is ushered in sometime after, tsking his way over to Ichabod’s bedside.

“Might have behooved you to take that partner we assigned you, hmm?”

“Hindsight,” Ichabod croak outs, wariness and exhaustion making the words catch in his still raw throat. “How long were you tracking-”

“A couple of months. No big deal.” Walters says, waving away the question as he throws himself unceremoniously into a nearby chair. “Up for the damage report?”

Ichabod has already taken into account the heavy swath of bandages as well as the faint memory of his injury. He knows he did not escape unscathed. 

Still some part of him is holding on to what ever flimsy hope modern medicine might offer him. But between the hospital’s jarring sterility and Walter’s flippant tone he can feel his nerves chipping away at his tightly held composure. 

He nods his assent, hoping it isn’t what he fears to be true. 

Walter eyes him for a moment, perhaps considering the growing cracks in Ichabod’s facade, but then forges ahead with little care.

“You are lucky really. Your left side took the brunt of it. You unfortunately lost your left eye. There isn’t much we can do about that. With physical therapy you might regain full range of motion in your left hand. Your face isn’t great but Dick in surveillance says you were never really much of a lady killer so maybe that isn’t huge loss.”

Ichabod winces. ‘Whether by blade or by negligence’ he thinks, and the words spool out before him, spiteful, accusatory and unceasing.

“Lady Killer” he murmurs, “Is that another colloquialism? I’m unfamiliar with it.”

Walters leans forward in his chair. His eyebrows raised over the thick rim of his glasses. Then he rises to his feet to stand at the side of the hospital bed.

“You’ll heal, that is all that matters. We might have to come to a different understanding of just what exactly you will do in order to carry out the mission now that you have so emphatically demonstrated your willingness to get yourself killed, but you will do your part, Mr. Crane. Now get some rest.”

Something snaps and Ichabod is launching himself across the bad, pulling tubes and needles tight to grab Walters with his good hand.

“You should have left me there!” he roars, “You should have let me die. Damn you.”

The guard barrels back into the room, removing Walters from Ichabod’s grip and hollering for the nurse as he tries to hold Ichabod down. Ichabod thrashes against the man’s hold trying to get free and yelling at Walter’s back as he makes for the door.

“Washington should have left me in the grave! Do you hear! I should have bled out on that battlefield! 

The nurse pushes past Walters, readying a syringe. Ichabod feels the needle and then the loss of all control - the rush of the drugs dragging him from consciousness.

He blinks and swallows against the sudden onset of tears.  
“Should have let me die” he slurs, “She would have lived if only…” 

Abbie doesn’t rescue him this time. She doesn’t turn the corner, falsified documents in hand and demanding his release but it is her smiling face he sees as he goes under. Her voice that welcomes him, beckons to him… reminding him to live.

—————

A few long painful months in the hospital and Crane can walk with the assistance of a cane. He can grasp at things with his burned hand if not a bit unsteadily, but the secret service is adamant that his fighting days are over.

After an infuriating but brief stint in management - Abbie had been much better at dealing with paperwork and bureaucratic red tape - he becomes the resident researcher of sorts. Shifting his way through hundreds of years of documentation on the supernatural. Organizing, translating, deciphering, digitizing - with the help of his aides - and consulting the teams of new agents Walters has recruited specifically to fight the threat of the a pending apocalypse. 

Early on in the arrangement they would even send the Witness out into the field to cast an odd spell or bless some artifact or another which Ichabod finds an unnerving bit of suspicion, but eventually they start bringing even those things to him in his ever growing library. He very rarely leaves and was glad when Walters suggested they build him quarters on site. 

The new living arrangement on the government compound is conveniently quashed up against the library. It’s a bit sterile with boring fixtures and lots of florescent light, few doors, and false windows with false views. Still it is an improvement upon the dinghy one bed room apartment he had previously resided in and compared to the home he had once shared with Abbie - the only home he will ever know in this time - most anything would be found wanting. 

He converts a few of the rooms into storage for the boxed up items from the archives, another into a study. The last he makes into a guest room in which, he has no doubt, no one will ever stay. 

He fills the dresser drawers with the clothes he had pilfered like a thief from her room, shoved hastily into bags in lieu of his own possessions. He lines a small bookshelf with her favorite books, places the box of ancient jazz records under the bed just as he found them and guilty worries if Jenny ever noticed them missing. Finally he requests a spider wort plant and sits it next to his succulent on the room’s single window sill. He tends to it diligently and in quieter moments he will linger in the room, fingering the plants delicate blooms and wondering at all the signs he had missed.

—————

Despite his certainty, he does have visitors, though they thankfully never stay long enough warrant use of his guest bedroom.  
Diane calls in on him occasionally bringing Molly, their arms loaded with home cooked meals. He welcomes them into his apartment worrying initially about Molly’s reaction to his eye patch and the scars but the young girl proves as tactful as her mother. 

She is lively and sweet and brings a bit of youthful color to grey walls of his isolation. But that trepidation that had arose at their first very meeting, that he had somehow brought yet another family into this wrecked business… even now when he has been so far removed from the most pressing dangers, its not easily shaken off. 

And its in the shadow of that incessant worry that he looks upon Miss Molly - at his kitchen table now, laughing with her mother and completely unaware of terrifying evil that has marked every aspect of his life - and sees instead Miss Macey possessed once again by Ancitif. Or worse, his Abbie before he had known her - young and haunted and so utterly alone. 

In a moment he is transported back to the archives, Abbie’s face lit by candlelight, her eyes liquid with emotion and ill gotten strength.

“I know what it's like to be lost in those woods..”

Ichabod’s fingers fly to his brow, he clears his throat trying to push down the sudden onset of tears. The cheery banter of mother and daughter is suddenly too much to bear and he pushes away from the dinner table.

“Excuse me” he mutters and stalks to the kitchen, where he bends over the linoleum countertop, trying to stamp down the flood of memories. Diane follows him of course, stands silently beside him until he can bring himself to turn and face her. 

And then he tells her everything. All that pain Abbie and Jenny shouldered on their own. All the people he had failed; Abbie, Joe, his own son, his wife. He tells her how Frank had ran to protect his little girl. And he pleads with her to do the same.

She objects at first. But something like horror dawns on her face the longer he speaks.

When it is finally done, Diana pulls Molly away from the homework she had laid out in their absence. They pack away her things. Diana bundles Molly up in her coat. They say their good byes and then Ichabod retreats to the solace of Abbie’s room. 

\-----------

Weeks later he receives a post card from Jenny. The message reads ‘package received’ and he knows Diana and Molly had been securely escorted away to the Irving’s. He hopes Jenny finds a reason to stay as well.

That evening when he sits down to dinner, he sees Abbie next to him picking at her orange chicken. She smiles up at him when he catches her eye.

“You did the right thing you know. They are safer this way.”

He nods, tears thick in his throat and she reaches across the table to take his hand.

“Sometimes I think it really was just suppose to be the two of us. Maybe we shouldn’t have fought against it so hard. Could have saved ourselves some grief.”

“Abbie”, he says, his voice breaking around her name. 

And then just as quickly as she had appeared, she’s gone.

“Abbie” he repeats, her naming building into sob and then a wail, until his screams are echoing through the empty rooms. He cries and rails, upturning tables, smashing dishes and lamps and his equipment.

He’s spent by the time Walters let himself in, sitting in his mess, eyes bloodshot and his knuckles bleeding.

Walters motions to the crew behind him and they filter though the door and start setting the furniture to right and cleaning up the bits of broken glass. He surveys the room for a moment and then turns to Ichabod and bends down to hand him two brightly colored pills in a small paper cup. Ichabod’s blood runs cold and he looks from the pills to Walters, shooting the man a dark look.

“I will not be drugged.” 

“You know we just want you healthy and happy, right Mr. Crane?”

“I won’t take it.”

Walters pauses, and then bends down even further until he’s far too close for comfort, his tone and stance menacing.

“We had Agent Thomas and the Mills girl followed. Imagine my surprise when we found Frank Irving and his family living under an alias in Capetown.”

Ichabod jerks away, his eyes widening and his heart thudding in his chest. His mind is racing as pieces together the signs, considering for the first time that these men are not the allies he thought them to be. He had been so cocksure of his own importance, of General Washington’s intentions that he had ignored the obvious flags and now…

Walters, seemingly satisfied that the message has struck home, straightens and eyes Ichabod until he raises a shaking hand and quickly swallows the pills down.

“That wasn’t so hard yeah? Don’t worry the meds are just until we are confident that these little episodes of yours won’t repeat themselves. And don’t take it personally.”

Walters claps him on the shoulder.

“Mission First.”


End file.
